The increase in the popularity of the Internet and the World-Wide-Web (“Web”) is due, in part, to the interactive technologies that a Web page can employ. These interactive technologies directly affect the Web as an advertising medium because the technologies introduced new advertising formats such as fixed icon sponsorship advertisements, rotating banners and buttons, and interstitial advertisements (i.e., online advertisements that interrupts the user's work and takes over a significant percentage of the screen display). Even though the creation of the advertisement is different, the affect on the viewer is similar to traditional advertising. For example, a banner advertisement or logo icon on a Web page creates an impression of the product for the viewer that is equivalent to a traditional billboard advertisement that promotes a product by presenting the brand name or slogan. Similarly, a sponsor's logo on a Web page creates an impression of the sponsor for the viewer that is equivalent to seeing a sponsor logo on the scoreboard at a college basketball game.
The rapid and volatile growth of the Internet over the last several years has created a high demand for quality statistics quantifying its magnitude and rate of expansion. Several traditional measurement methodologies produce useful statistics about the Internet and its users, but the complexity of the Internet has left some of these methodologies unable to answer many important questions.
Online advertising is one area where traditional methodologies do not lend well to measurement. Each day, thousands upon thousands of electronic advertisements appear and then disappear from millions of Web pages. The transitory nature of online advertising activity warrants a novel methodology to accurately measure advertising activity.
Existing advertisement tracking and measurement systems automate the collection of Web pages, but fail to automate the collection of the online advertisements. Since the content of an online advertisement changes or rotates over time, accurate reconstruction of the frequency of specific advertisements requires continuous sampling of relevant Web pages in the correct proportions. Furthermore, due to the sheer size of the Web, sampling algorithms must be finely tuned to optimize the allocation of resources (i.e., network bandwidth, database storage, processor time, etc.) and simultaneously enable maximum Internet coverage. The existing advertisement tracking and measurement systems fail to meet these needs because they are not optimized for resource allocation and do not continuously sample relevant Web pages in the correct proportion.
In view of the deficiencies of the existing systems described above, there is a need for an advertisement tracking and measurement system that uses resources more intelligently, is friendlier to the Web sites that it visits, is scalable, and produces accurate measurements. The invention disclosed herein addresses this need.